


Undying

by ncfan



Category: Umineko no Naku Koro ni | When the Seagulls Cry
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, For EP7, Gen, POV Female Character, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-17
Updated: 2014-08-27
Packaged: 2018-02-13 14:35:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 16,260
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2154234
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ncfan/pseuds/ncfan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There was nothing for her in Japan, so naturally, she left. [AU, spoilers for EP7.]</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter One

**Author's Note:**

> So, Isae on Fanfiction.net and I were talking: What if Sayo never fell in love with any of the cousins (or anyone else) before finding out the truth of her past, her heritage and her body? We agreed that she still would have been traumatized, but she might have been slightly less traumatized by it. I wonder if maybe, with this difference in mind, Sayo would have lived past 1986, and the family massacre might never have occurred. My reasoning is this: in 1986, Sayo announced to the family that she had found the gold two years earlier and that she possessed the ring of the head of the family. She handed the ring over to Krauss and distributed the majority of the gold, but took a portion for herself, left the island, and proceeded to go traveling.

When she was little, there were times when Sayo imagined that it would be good to know who her parents were.

As a child of the Fukuin House, she was taught to believe that God was her father and that with God for a father, there was no need for an earthly mother, or an earthly father, for that matter. The few children of the Fukuin House who were ever adopted (and Sayo was not one of those; she was never even looked at twice by prospective adoptive parents) were told that their new parents were their caretakers, to be loved and honored like their parents, but that they would always have God's love. God would always be their father, even when they went into the home of a man and a woman they called 'Father' and 'Mother.' No one was ever encouraged to express curiosity over their origins.

And yet, Sayo had felt the odd twinge of curiosity. She could only suppose that it marked her out as deviant, that she had God as her father and yet wanted more. She was an orphan with no past. Her past was a closed book with a lock on it, and Sayo, ever curious, kept searching for a key or a lock pick. Her future was unfolding before her, but it would have been nice, she thought, to know the name of the road where she had begun.

As they say: Be careful what you wish for.

When Sayo got her wish, she thought it might have been better had she never been born. And she could see that she had no future. Not on Rokkenjima.

But what of the rest of the world?

Only time could tell.

-0-0-0-

Two years she had spent, preparing for the day she would leave the island. Sayo had taken some days off of work to venture inland in order to obtain a passport. Her regular time off was now spent entirely researching Italy's immigration policies and trying her best to teach herself the language. She had bought workbooks and cassette tapes, practicing pronunciation and comparing it against the voices on the tapes, and taking quizzes out of her workbooks, as many times as needed until her score was perfect. When Sayo could read an Italian novel and follow most of what was going on, she felt, well, she didn't feel ready, but she felt as ready as she knew she ever would.

Two years she waited, and in October of 1986, she left, leaving a place that had been her resting place but not her home behind her, leaving a family she wished she didn't have for the circumstances that caused her to be a part of it. She took with her a great sum of money derived from her grandmother's gold, and left the rest to her stunned half-siblings. Sayo did not inform them of her relation to them. She knew them all too well to believe that she would have fared well after such a revelation, and honestly, Sayo didn't _want_ to be their sister, their brother, or whatever it was she was. She handed Kinzo's ring over to Krauss, and felt nothing. The ring had no value. It may as well have been her noose, but Sayo felt nothing to remove it.

(Genji had one last 'gift' for her. Sayo did not know how he'd done it, but he had altered her birth certificates to list her birth parents. Sayo was now the acknowledged child of Ushiromiya Kinzo and his daughter, Beatrice, the acknowledged granddaughter of Ushiromiya Kinzo and Beatrice Castiglioni. She didn't know whether to thank Genji or spit in his face. It was all she could do not to do both.)

When Sayo learned the truth of who she was, she felt like a doll whose lungs were stolen from her and whose limbs had been attached to strings. She was the puppet of fate. She did not feel as though she had begun to breathe again, did not feel as though the strings had been cut, until she stepped off of the plane and set foot on Syracuse, in Sicily.

-0-0-0-

(A well-meaning café waitress warned Sayo of a few things about being a tourist. Don't wear expensive clothes. Don't wear too much jewelry. Always make sure that you know exactly where you are going, and don't go out after dark, at least not anywhere well-lit. Also, your Italian is very good for a tourist, she said, but don't let on _too much_ that you're a tourist.

Sayo had no intention of that. Certainly, she had bought new things with her newfound wealth. She had four dresses, three blouses, two skirts, two pairs of slacks, three pairs of shoes, one coat, two scarves and a bathing suit. Beyond that, not much. She had almost bought a necklace with a pendant in the shape of a rose before Sayo had stared again at the pendant, and become reviled. She didn't really need anything else. If she wanted to read a book, she would frequent a library.

And she wasn't really a tourist.

Rokkenjima could never be home. It was more on the level of a prison. A fish who had never known anything but an aquarium could believe that the aquarium was the whole world, but when a fish had tasted the ocean, they would see the aquarium for what it was: a small, constricting prison.

Japan had too many of the features of Rokkenjima. Taiwan was an option, but Sayo's blood ties to that land came to her through Kinzo. Instead, Sayo would journey to the only other place on earth that she could claim was hers by blood, and see if there was anything here that could convince her to stay.)

-0-0-0-

She started out in Syracuse in the winter. It had snowed sometimes on Rokkenjima, but Sayo did not believe that this place had ever seen snow, not in a lifetime at least. The winters were wet, something Sayo was used to, but she saw the sun and felt warmth on her skin more than she had on Rokkenjima at this time of year. It felt… It felt… She had no words to describe how it felt.

Like something new, she supposed.

In her actions, Sayo supposed that she was something like a tourist, after all. She started in Sicily, in the wet, mild winter. She visited the Necropolis of Pantalica, an archaeological site supposed to boast over five thousand* tombs hewn into the limestone. Sayo wandered away from the tour, stumbling over the steep hills and narrow, winding paths. She ran her fingers over the entrances to the tombs, stared into the dark, and wondered if she would ever see eyes staring back.

In Ispica, she stared at a ruined, centuries-old monastery covered in trees and bushes. Sayo imagined the chapel on Rokkenjima looking just the same, and thought it would be a fitting end.

Under Palermo there was the Capuchin Catacombs, and Sayo nearly ran out screaming when it began to too closely resemble the chambers under Kuwadorian.

Standing beneath a vault fresco in the Basilica della Collegiata, she wondered if God would ever forgive her for contemplating the death of the Ushiromiya family— _her_ family.

Sayo saw many things in Sicily. She wandered through many towns, hearing the sounds and smelling the mixed aromas of life. And nowhere did she see anything that could convince her to stay. Nowhere did she see that nebulous thing that would have let her stay.

-0-0-0-

(Sometimes, Sayo wondered exactly what it was she was looking for.

Sometimes, she imagined that it was Beatrice.

She imagined that she was looking for the ghost of Beatrice in her homeland, trying to find some echo of the fantastical woman in the landscape. She imagined that she was trying to hear Beatrice's voice on the night wind.

The thought was repulsive.

If that was what Sayo was looking for, she was just as insane as Kinzo had been. She was _not_ Kinzo. Sayo had Kinzo's blood, and nothing would ever change that, but she was not him. She would not look for Beatrice.)

-0-0-0-

In Naples, just as the lemon trees were beginning to bloom, Sayo learned how to swim.

Amando was about twenty-one or so. He had curly dark hair and an uneven tan; his limbs and his face were quite brown, but his chest was pale. He had an easy laugh and didn't seem even to notice Sayo's still rather uneven pronunciation. At the very least, he was gracious enough not to comment on it. The sting of realizing that she didn't speak Italian as well as she thought she did was still fresh. She could be grateful to Amando for not drawing attention to it.

Under the water, swimming in the deep blue sea, Sayo felt lighter than she ever had. She saw schools of silver fish that glittered in the sunlight, saw the shafts of light and shadow that rippled like a curtain. The sea had never been like this in Rokkenjima. But then, Sayo had never swam in the sea off of Rokkenjima. The beach wasn't hers to bask on, and the sea wasn't hers to swim in. She was caged as Beatrice's spirit was, bound to the land. The island was her cage, the beach the iron bars that kept her in. This was the sea of the world. In it, Sayo was weightless.

Amando liked her. Sayo wasn't blind.

He liked her 'exotic' looks. Sayo had to swallow bitterly on that. In Japan, she had been looked at askance by many because she looked 'foreign'. Sayo hadn't known what they meant by that, and should have suspected, but of course everyone could see how strange she was, wasn't her strangeness self-evident? (There were some who had thought her—or him—good-looking despite that, but Sayo tried not to think about them anymore, even when they were all she could see.) Was she going to be 'foreign' everywhere? Was everyone she would ever meet on the earth going to look at her and think, _know_ , that she didn't belong with them?

He had complimented the tattoo on her left leg. Sayo considered telling him that she had had the image of the One-Winged Eagle engraved onto her flesh when she learned that her entire life had been a puppet show for the Ushiromiya family, when she had learned that her birth, her very existence, was the end result of rape and incest, when she had come to believe that she was a game piece on a roulette board, and that the only way to escape would be to leave everything behind her. She clamped her mouth shut over the words. It would have only frightened him.

He liked to tell her stories about the things he'd gotten up to in Naples and on his father's fishing boat. He talked of seeing strange lights on the horizon at dusk, lights that could never be explained away by having as their source fishing boats or one of the many tiny islands that dotted the Mediterranean. He spoke of the trouble his great uncle would get into whenever he got drunk and what it was like to fly in an airplane for the first time, when one of his friends invited him to visit relatives in the Netherlands. Amando would ask her if she had any stories to tell and Sayo would smile prettily and say no, while slamming doors and stolen keys flashed through her mind.

Sayo had worn a bathing suit around him. A _skin-tight_ bathing suit. Amando had seen more of her boyish, broken body than possibly anyone alive. And yet he still thought she was attractive.

On a beautiful evening, the cloudless sky awash with crimson and fuchsia and gold, he tried to kiss her. Sayo pulled her head gently back when Amando leaned in, and smiled apologetically in response.

'Attractive' or not, he didn't know the truth. Didn't know that her body was twisted and broken, that though she called herself a woman she had been born a boy. He didn't know that Sayo was still working out whether she was a human being or a piece of furniture unfortunate enough to be given a beating heart. Amando didn't know that she had nothing to offer him, and never would.

Before she had known the truth, Sayo had realized that George probably liked Shannon, the same way Amando liked her. Before she had known, Shannon had played dumb to his attempts to make her aware of this, reasoning that as a maid of the Ushiromiya family, it would not be her place. When she had known the truth, she knew that George was her cousin, and that he was her nephew. He liked _girls_ , not girl-boy _things_ that played at being one of the other. He would have balked at the idea of incest. She did not regret rejecting him.

After she discovered the truth, Sayo had realized that Jessica liked Kanon the same way Amando liked her. Jessica was Sayo's cousin, and her niece. Jessica liked _boys_ , not boy-girl _things_ that played at being one or the other. She would have balked at the idea of incest. Sayo did not regret rejecting her.

Sayo left Naples the next day.

She imagined that Amando's lips would have tasted of salt.

-0-0-0-

Pompeii managed to be an eerier place than the tunnels dug under Rokkenjima and the ruins of Kuwadorian, half-reclaimed by nature as it had been.

In ruined Kuwadorian, Sayo had seen a forgiving promise. Nature and the world would hide the blot that had been cast on the land for a house to be erected for the purpose of caging an innocent girl. It had been a comfort to look at the ivy growing over the walls and the young trees sprouting up in the rose gardens to know that her mother's manor-prison would be consumed and rendered unrecognizable, possibly even within her own lifetime.

By contrast, Pompeii was a gutted, ashen ruin left open to the sky. It was so carefully preserved that no trees or shrubs would ever engulf this place. It was too carefully preserved for the scars of remembered suffering to ever be wiped clean from the earth.

Sayo wandered down empty deserted streets and listened to the wind howl through broken walls and open roofs. She stared, transfixed, at plaster casts of the victims, their bodies twisted and reeling from their own deaths.

You know, she could have died somewhat like this. Choked by poisonous smoke, or smothered by ash, or, at the end, if she was unlucky enough to survive so long, she could have been consumed by fire. This lot had had only minutes or hours at the most to appreciate how fragile their lives were. Sayo would have decades to think on that.

She found herself smiling at strangers more often.

-0-0-0-

As the weather warmed and the sun made its presence known between the clouds more often, Sayo's skin tanned and her hair lightened. She looked into the dingy mirror of her hotel room one day and stared, startled, at what she saw.

Her skin was no longer the soft, pale pink it was when she had served the Ushiromiya family as their servant. Neither was her hair the dark brown it had become as she grew older. Instead, her skin, while lighter than many of the tanned girls who vacationed here, had grown light brown, interspersed with freckles—Sayo had forgotten her sunscreen for too many days at a time for it to go unchanged. Her hair was nearly as light as it had been when she was a child, golden-brown as it now was.

It took a moment for Sayo to recognize herself in the mirror. She couldn't remember the last time she had willingly stared at herself in a mirror. She couldn't stand to look at her face, you see, before because it seemed so pathetic, and afterwards because she was terrified that she would see Kinzo staring back at her, too.

She looked like a different person, now.

For the first time, Sayo smiled at her reflection.

-0-0-0-

(This is a ghost story Sayo told herself.

It was inspired by listening to an old man tell his young grandchildren a tale in Florence. They had begged and begged until he told them the story of a mermaid who lost her life for the love of the land, for a mermaid could not survive away from the water for long, and she dried up away from the ocean. She had gone somewhere she didn't belong, and died as a result.

This is a ghost story Sayo told herself:

There was once an old sorcerer who fell madly, truly madly, in love with a beautiful witch. In his madness, he imprisoned her in an old holding of his deep within a nigh impenetrable forest. The witch, despairing of ever regaining her freedom, committed suicide… No, not suicide. Never suicide. The witch severed her ties with mortal flesh to escape the sorcerer, but he was as clever as he was mad. He had anticipated this.

The sorcerer caught the witch's soul before it could depart and sealed it in a newborn homunculus. The homunculus would grow believing itself to be human, an amnesiac with no memory of its time as the witch. The homunculus was brought up in the sorcerer's household as a girl servant, distantly cared for by the elderly housekeeper and the sorcerer's oldest friend and closest confidant.

The homunculus did not learn the truth until the hour of the sorcerer's death. She was dressed up in the witch's old clothes and presented to him, so that he could make his peace with her at last. His last words were spent gifting his fortune to her and begging the witch's forgiveness for how he had wronged her. He died content.

Meanwhile, the homunculus lived in turmoil.

All her life, she had believed herself human. Now, she discovered that she was not. She discovered that her 'father' had committed the greatest sin known to man. He had intruded upon God's domain, and created life. She was not a human being; she was a living doll. Her soul was not her own. So what was she?

And that old man. Why was it that he was allowed to settle all his regrets when he had committed the worst of all sins? Why was he allowed to die content when his ill-begotten creation lived in turmoil?

The homunculus, she took the fortune she had been gifted and left the place where she had been brought up. Not her home, though in all honesty it never had been. She searched the world, looking for a reason for why she was alive. She journeyed, seeking purpose.

She journeys still, but lately the journey has weighed less on her shoulders than it used to.

She searches still.)

-0-0-0-

Venice was supposed to rank among the most beautiful cities on the face of the earth. All the tourism agencies Sayo visited had raved about the city's loveliness, practically begged her to go visit. And indeed, Sayo had to admit that she had never seen the city's like before. As she lazily wandered through the city, she laid eyes on more canals and bridges than she had ever seen in one place before. She gazed through shop windows showcasing the famous Venetian glass, fashioned into glassware or stained glass windowpanes or figurines. The wind whistled through trees and shrubs and flowers packed into cramped gardens. The sun shone weakly down from the cloudy sky.

She found herself standing outside of Saint Mark's Basilica, having wandered through crowds of humans and pigeons alike, staring up at replicas of the Horses of Saint Mark. The four massive bronze horses were made green by exposure to the elements, and were positioned above the entrance into the cathedral. Sayo couldn't see them very well from where she was standing, but from what little she saw, they seemed spectacularly lifelike.

The cathedral alike was massive, adorned with domes and spires and arches. Above the main entrance there was a statue of Saint Mark surrounded by angels; beneath him on the gable was perched a winged lion. Sayo felt as though the saint's eyes had fallen upon her; the hairs on the back of her neck prickled.

"The cathedral is lovely, isn't it?"

Sayo's head snapped to her left; she stared, startled, at a woman who had come to stand beside her. The woman was quite elderly, her hair silver with age and her face deeply lined. But she stood straight and tall, and her mouth and bright blue eyes crinkled in a kind smile.

Sayo smiled slightly back at her. "Yes, it is. I've never seen any equal." There had certainly been some cathedrals in Rome that outshone this one; certainly, the Vatican must have outshone this cathedral, as beautiful as it was. But Sayo had skipped Rome on her trip—her ultimate purpose in Italy was not to sight-see, after all—so she couldn't know.

"You're not from around here, are you?"

Sayo felt her face grow warm. "Is it really so obvious?" What was it about her that seemed to mark her out as a tourist to everyone she met? She hoped it was merely that her grasp of Italian was not so secure as it would have been for a native; though Sayo had contemplated this possibility more than once, she did not want to think that her facial features would clearly mark her out as 'foreign' wherever she went.

The woman nodded. "You had the air of someone over-awed by her surroundings. What is your name?"

"Sayo Yasuda." Sayo had learned early on not to tell anyone her name surname first. Most assumed, from that, that 'Yasuda' was her given name. Being called 'Yasuda' without so much as an honorific to go with it was too close to being called 'Yasu' for her tastes. "And your name, ma'am?" she asked politely, trying to hide her disquiet at being asked her name without the woman having first supplied hers.

The woman's eyes lit up. "Oh, so you are Japanese?"

Sayo nodded cautiously. This was the first time someone had asked her name and immediately known it to be Japanese.

"Well, young lady, my name is Beatrice Silvestri."

"My mother's name was Beatrice," Sayo blurted out, before she could clamp her mouth shut over the words. "Her mother was from Italy," she explained in response to Beatrice Silvestri's quizzical look.

The smile faded from the old woman's face. "Is that so?" She paused, brow furrowed. "You speak of your mother as if she is dead."

"She is."

"My condolences, then, on her passing."

Sayo shook her head sharply, frowning. "My mother died when I was a baby." _And when she decided to escape Kinzo, she didn't want me in the new life she longed to live._ "I never knew her, and knew nothing of her until a few years ago."

She was older, now, than her mother had been when she died. Sayo had been nearly the same age as her mother at the time of her death when she learned the truth of her mother's identity. Somehow, she doubted that Signora Silvestri particularly wanted to hear that.

"Still, you have my condolences." Beatrice's mouth twisted momentarily. "That makes it worse, in a way. Are you here with your grandmother, then?"

"No, Signora. My grandmother passed on long ago." And no matter how much she had pressed, Genji, Kumasawa and Doctor Nanjo alike had been exceedingly vague as to the nature of her death. Sayo could only suppose that her grandmother had died giving birth, or something along those lines. "I'm here alone."

"What, alone?" Beatrice's eyebrows shot up. "At your age?"

"I'm twenty," Sayo replied shortly. She had often been mistaken for a girl of much younger years in this land, when she was no longer padding her bra or trying to hide her real body shape from the world. She knew why, and didn't care for it. Not at all.

Beatrice frowned. "Still, you are young to be here by yourself. If you like, you could stay with my family."

Sayo frowned. She had been warned, above all other things, to beware offers such as this. She could meet with great harm, she was told, could end up robbed, raped, or even murdered.

But what could they do to her? Money meant little to Sayo, and who would want to touch her after seeing her mutilated body? Death also meant little, and beyond that…

Beyond that, she could not sense any malice within Beatrice Silvestri.

"I would… like that, yes."

And she could not remember the last time someone had helped her without any sign of ulterior motives.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> * Most recent estimates actually put the number at closer to four thousand.


	2. Chapter Two

Beatrice Silvestri was the wife of Paolo Silvestri, a moderately successful architect in Venice. She was sixty-eight years old and the mother of three children: Pietro, aged thirty-four, Giovanni, aged thirty-one, and Lucia, aged twenty-four. She had three granddaughters, Pietro's Elena and Isotta (aged eight and five, respectively), and Giovanni's Isabella (Aged six).

She was known as a kind, clever woman who always proffered an ear for the troubled. She couldn't cook to save her life—it was down to Paolo or Lucia or sometimes Pietro to do the cooking around the house. Signora Silvestri painted a little, but not for a living. Paolo wasn't the sort of man who would have asked for his wife to work for a living anyways.

There was nothing in Beatrice's character that could invite reproach. It was rumored that she was the daughter of a man who had been high in Mussolini's confidence during the Second World War. She herself was rumored to have enjoyed a wild youth, taking up with many men as a young woman. But even if any of this were true, that was in the distant past.

-0-0-0-

(No one ever asked Beatrice why she flinched when she heard a baby crying. There were many who noticed, of course, but it invariably went unremarked.)

-0-0-0-

When Beatrice Castiglioni met Ushiromiya Kinzo, it was hardly under the best of circumstances. Over forty years later, she could still remember how her lungs had screamed for lack of air and from breathing in smoke and poisonous gas in the submarine. She remembered being soot-smeared and tear-soaked. She remembered watching good, honest men die, her father among them.

She remembered how bone-weary she felt when she learned that they had docked and she was going to have to go outside and behave presentably in front of the Japanese soldiers. At home before the war, Beatrice would have to 'behave presentably' at home, but she could always venture off of her family's estate to the homes of her lower-born friends. At home before the war, Beatrice could always seek out the company of those who didn't care if she behaved like a lady or not, didn't care if she was plainspoken or even crude in their presence. She was their friend, in some cases their lover, and could be herself.

It couldn't be like that in the submarine. Beatrice's father rarely allowed her out of his sight. He feared that if one of the sailors caught her alone, she would be taken advantage of—never mind that Beatrice had spoken with the crew often enough to know his fears to be completely unfounded. _If it is my virginity you are concerned about,_ Beatrice nearly said one day, _rest assured that that hasn't been an issue for_ years _now._ But there was nothing Leandro Castiglioni could be told to ease his troubled mind as to his daughter's safety.

The sailors themselves looked upon her with a mixture of respect and complete _awe_ , though whether because of her noble background or because she was the only woman in the submarine, she couldn't say. It was a feeling Beatrice was unused to. Usually, those who saw her in the role of 'daughter of the Castiglioni' stared straight through her. To them, she was not a person separate from her family; she was merely an appendage attached to her father, of no importance except as a marriage chip. Here, however, everyone snapped to attention when they saw her, even the captain (And after he was killed, that fell to Ensign Angelo). Beatrice could not pretend to be comfortable with their adulation, especially when she knew that she didn't live up to their expectations at all.

She had not expected the Japanese soldiers on Rokkenjima to be any more personable. Either they would treat her with the same alienating awe that her countrymen had adopted, or they would be contemptuous of this foreign woman, living where she absolutely did not belong.

Of course, she'd not expected Kinzo, either.

The first surprise had come while one of the crewmen was helping her out of the submarine: "Does anyone here speak English?"

Between harsh, choking coughs, Beatrice called out "I can… speak English."

The speaker was one of the Japanese soldiers, a man who had been hauled out in front of his countrymen despite not appearing to be an officer of any great rank. He was quite tall, dwarfing Beatrice in height, and on account of his white hair, Beatrice initially assumed him to be much older than he actually was. In fact, Kinzo was two years shy of forty when they met, twelve years Beatrice's senior.

Beatrice could count on one hand the number of times she had ever been in love. Once was with Paolo, her husband, and that had not happened for years. Another had been with the first man she slept with, until she found out that he had slept with her for the express purpose of being able to claim that he had deflowered a noblewoman. Another had been with Kinzo.

In Italy, as a rule, Beatrice had avoided relationships with married men. It was more out of sympathy to their wives than out of scruples—marriage could be its own kind of prison, especially for women, and Beatrice knew just as well as the rest how difficult it could be to obtain a divorce. She felt sorry for Kinzo's wife when he spoke so dismissively of her and the children they had had together. "A family I was chained to," he called them, and Beatrice bit her tongue to keep from protesting that, by all accounts, his wife had had no more choice of marriage partner than he. It was funny, Beatrice thought, in a sick kind of way, that she could be so defensive of a woman she had never met, whose name she had never learned.

But in Japan, Beatrice had discarded her rule. She would never be able to say why, except that perhaps love and loneliness had infected her with recklessness. Kinzo said that he didn't care about his family, that he didn't love them. He loved only her. Beatrice tried not to think about them, those nameless wife and children of Kinzo's (Though truthfully, she was never quite able not to care).

It had been so wonderful at first. Beatrice couldn't quite behave as she had with her close friends in Italy—Kinzo balked at the first hint of crudeness in her speech or conversation—but she could speak frankly with him as she had been unable to do for months. He wasn't dismissive of her the way the other Japanese were, and he didn't treat her with the awe the Italians did. He spoke directly to her. He had a good idea of the sort of useless, apathetic existence she had led as a caged child of the nobility. The fact that he was quite handsome and capable of a certain strange charm certainly didn't hurt. But, most importantly, he didn't think of her as a daughter of the Castiglioni.

It had been so wonderful, at first.

-0-0-0-

When Lucia was fifteen, she wanted to go to Cosenza in the south of Italy to meet a girl she had been corresponding with through a program at her school. Paolo thought it would be good for her to travel some, but Beatrice had been against it. As a fifteen-year-old girl, Lucia was, well, not particularly reliable. She had no eye for danger and was entirely too trusting of strangers. She reminded Beatrice so much of herself at that age that it hurt.

"You are my youngest daughter," Beatrice told her, sitting at the kitchen table and rubbing her forehead wearily. "If anything happened to you…"

Lucia frowned at her. "I'm your _only_ daughter," she pointed out, eyeing her mother uncertainly.

Beatrice stared at her for what felt like an eternity, torn between the urges to cry or slap her daughter for reasons the child certainly wouldn't understand. Finally, she stared down at the ground and said quietly, "Go speak with your father about the arrangements."

When Lucia enthusiastically thanked her, Beatrice waved her off, barely hearing a word.

-0-0-0-

It was so wonderful, at first. Kinzo set her up in a house in Odawara; he had the money for that. They couldn't see each other every day, of course. Kinzo had business he needed to attend to, and he needed to spend enough time in the house he shared with his wife that she wouldn't grow suspicious (Later, Beatrice would wonder exactly how successful Kinzo had been on that score). They couldn't see each other as often as Beatrice would have liked.

But wasn't there something thrilling about this kind of existence? Beatrice had always found it exhilarating keeping a secret, and now she herself was a secret. It was both exhilarating and terrifying, the idea that someone might find her here. This kind of life was like something straight out of a fairytale.

Fairytales always had happy endings, though. They never had loose strings. They never spoke of the heroine becoming disillusioned with the life she now led.

Gradually, Beatrice began to see less and less how living in secret as Kinzo's lover was a thrilling kind of existence. She saw more and more how that precarious her current situation was. Beatrice had no fear of Kinzo's wife forcing him to turn her away; given how dismissively Kinzo spoke of her, Beatrice doubted that that woman would have any power to influence him, even if she did find out about all this. There were other things Beatrice feared.

She was dependent upon Kinzo for everything. Beatrice couldn't speak Japanese, and her only family, if they even lived still, was thousands of miles away. She had no money, and no friends here, and her complete lack of Japanese was a problem, in that she couldn't effectively communicate with _anyone_ except for Kinzo, considering that none of the servants he had assigned her spoke Italian or English. If Kinzo were to die or decide he wanted nothing more to do with her, she would be out of food, out of a home, and with very few options. The most she could do inn that situation would be to try to find someone who spoke a language she could understand (not the Americans, though; she doubted that they would be kind to the daughter of one of Mussolini's officials) and get them to take her back to Italy.

There was the fact that Kinzo would never be indifferent to her, would never _not_ be in love with her. There was that.

But there was still more to stir the beginnings of fear in her.

It was a restrictive life, never leaving the house in Odawara Kinzo had provided her. It was a big house certainly, with guest bedrooms that made Beatrice smile bitterly at the sight of them, for she knew that they would never be filled, but for all that it was a big house, Beatrice had already explored it in full. There was a back garden, but its walls were high and there were no gates leading in or out of them. The curtains in the house had to be left perpetually drawn. All Beatrice ever saw of the sky was the small blue patch that glimmered over the garden.

Beatrice was unused to living under such restrictive conditions. In Italy, she had had the run of her family's estate, the surrounding countryside and the nearest town. So, it seemed simple enough to ask Kinzo if she could go out and explore the town.

He said no.

Neither was Beatrice one to take a simple 'no' for an answer. She frowned, and began to run through conditions. She wouldn't draw attention to herself; she would wear a scarf over her head to hide her golden hair. Still, he refused. She wouldn't go out after dark, Beatrice wheedled; she wouldn't venture anywhere he didn't want her to. Another refusal. Finally, Beatrice promised that she would not go anywhere without an escort Kinzo trusted. This was the bitterest concession Beatrice could make. In Italy, she'd not gone anywhere with an escort since, at sixteen, she'd given them the slip for the umpteenth time and her father had finally given up on the idea.

"No, Bice." Kinzo turned his head to the side, frowning darkly. "I…" He sucked in a sharp breath. "No, Bice. There's too much at stake."

After that, there was nothing Beatrice could say to sway him. Eventually, she gave up. Beatrice would like to say that it had been because it no longer mattered to her. But in honesty, she had been shaken by the vehemence with which he refused her.

(Out of curiosity, she tried the door one day. It was locked. Beatrice had no idea who beside Kinzo had the key.)

Eventually, Beatrice began to grow a bit homesick, and worried over her family. At that time, Beatrice had no intention of returning to Italy and the caged life her family had tried to make her live. However, there had been relatives she was fond of, distant cousins and aunts and uncles. She wanted to discover if they were still alive, and also to reassure them that she was still alive as well. For that, Beatrice would need Kinzo's help. She couldn't get a letter out of the country or even out of the city without his help.

On this, Beatrice was refused, even more vehemently than when she asked to be allowed to go into the city. If the Japanese government discovered her, she would be deported. If the Americans discovered her, she would be taken in for questioning, maybe even killed. Either way, they would be separated forever. Did she really want that?

Beatrice frowned slightly. As bad as they were, she doubted that the Americans would go so far as to _kill_ her; surely she would eventually have been deported, the same as if she had been detained by the Japanese. All the same, she gave in, agreeing not to try to contact her family. His eyes had burned so feverishly when he pleaded with her that she couldn't help but agree.

When he visited, Kinzo began asking questions. Had anyone come calling on her? Had she had any visitors?

"No, of course I haven't. No one but you and the servants even know I'm here," Beatrice pointed out, careful to hide her frustration.

Well, had she spoken with any of the servants? How did she get along with them? Kinzo was especially curious as to how she got on with the male servants.

"There's not much to say. They only speak Japanese, after all."

Kinzo seemed markedly unsatisfied with this response.

They were little things on their own; at least, most of them were. One or two of them on their own, and if they had happened but once, wouldn't have bothered Beatrice. She wouldn't have noticed anything out of the ordinary. However, that wasn't what this was. As all of these things piled up, Beatrice looked at her life, pent up in this house, and realized that even a mangy, starving alley cat had more freedom than she. She looked, and thought.

The thoughts came to her unbidden. She thought about being cooped up in this house alone, with no one around her whom she could speak with. Kinzo was the only one, and he seemed quite content for it to stay that way. Beatrice couldn't contact her family, her friends, anyone. She couldn't go out into the world, couldn't seek out new friends, couldn't even leave the house. All of this, because Kinzo forbade it.

Beatrice's mind strayed to a place it rarely did. She didn't like to dwell on it, for her own peace of mind, but once she had gotten started, there was no way to stop. So, just how had it come to pass that she and Kinzo alone, with no others, had survived the massacre on Rokkenjima? How was it that everyone else, the Japanese and her countrymen alike, had ended up dead? Whose idea was it to get into a fight over the gold, anyway? It seemed mightily convenient that at the end it had just been them and the gold. Kinzo had once mentioned that he was a good shot…

And this was the man whom Beatrice was dependent on for everything.

The idea germinated in her mind for weeks, before finally coming to fruition one November night. She needed to leave. She needed to find a way home. She needed to escape.

Beatrice didn't know if she was still in love with Kinzo. Even now, so many years later, she did not know for sure. In many ways, she became afraid of him, afraid of what would happen if she said the wrong thing or angered him too much. At the same time, she still loved talking with him, still craved his company. But how much of that was due to love, and how much due to an even more profound loneliness than what she had felt on the submarine after her father died?

She had to leave.

But learning she was pregnant threw off her admittedly ill-conceived plans.

By the time Beatrice learned that she was pregnant, it was too late to hide it from Kinzo. When he saw that she was unwell, he insisted that Doctor Nanjo examine her, and when Doctor Nanjo told Kinzo what Beatrice already knew, Kinzo was happier than she had ever seen him. He hugged Beatrice tightly, going on animatedly about how wonderful this was and how beautiful he was sure the child would be. For a man who was already father to three children, he sounded as though he had never gone through this before.

He was smiling so brightly, and for a few days, Beatrice hesitated, and rethought her plan to leave. She would wait until after she had had the child.

Beatrice knew very well that she couldn't return to her family, what was left of them, while pregnant. She would have liked to say that her parents, were they alive, would have accepted her with open, loving arms, without judging her. But that would have been a lie. Her parents would have been ashamed of her. There was much in the life of Beatrice Castiglioni that her parents would have been ashamed of, would have rejected. But at least they would have taken her in, even if they didn't do so gladly. The rest of her family, the elders at least, didn't love her enough for their love to outweigh the shame they would have felt at an unwed daughter of the family turning up pregnant on their doorstep.

She would wait, waiting with terrified anticipation for the day her child would come into the world.

-0-0-0-

(The first time Beatrice kissed Kinzo was a very… _intense_ experience.

They had snuck into some dark nook on the base. It was less exposed than the forest or the cliffs, and yet there was a greater risk of discovery here than there was outside. He had his hands on her hips and she had her back pressed up against the clammy wall. Beatrice's heart was throbbing in her throat, and she had to fight to keep from groaning with pleasure.

The first time Beatrice and Paolo kissed wasn't nearly as remarkable an experience.

He always walked her home from her work with his aunt in the floristry. Even when Beatrice said nothing, his easy, good-natured talk filled the evening air. Just as she was passing the threshold to the tiny apartment she was living in, she paused, turned about, stood up on tiptoe and kissed him.

It wasn't deep or passionate. His response didn't leave her breathless. It just felt like coming home.)

-0-0-0-

Childbirth was far more excruciating than Beatrice had imagined it would be, even in her darkest dreams. She could barely believe Doctor Nanjo when he told her, in his slightly faltering English, that she had had an _easy_ labor.

It took nearly a week before she felt well enough to travel. That was just as well; Kinzo spent the whole week hovering over her and the baby, fussing over them and waiting on them hand and foot. It would have been sweet, under different circumstances. Under these, Beatrice could only smile tiredly and pray with every fiber of her being that he would leave them, eventually.

Finally, Kinzo departed, returning to the home he shared with his wife—Beatrice had never been more relieved to see him go. In the dead of night, she slid out of bed and, sore and weak as she still was, she got dressed and gathered a few belongings in her purse.

Beatrice ventured next to the nursery. Now, she could take her daughter home and claim that she had been married to the child's father, that she had been married to the man, and that he had died. It wasn't much of a story. Even in her mind, it felt weak, felt cowardly. But she remembered her own mother once saying that a mother did what she had to for her children. If Beatrice needed to be a coward for her own child, than a coward she would be.

She crept into the darkness of the nursery, praying that her daughter wouldn't start to cry. As she was gathering the baby up into her arms, a voice rang out. "You mustn't take the child."

Beatrice whirled around, heart hammering in horror. Standing in the doorway was one of the men assigned to see to the upkeep of the house. His normally expressionless face was creased faintly, brow furrowed as he surveyed the scene before him.

"You speak English," Beatrice murmured shakily, still holding her daughter close in her arms.

The man nodded. "Yes, I do."

Beatrice didn't know whether to laugh or cry. She especially didn't know why she was surprised that it seemed that Kinzo had forbidden this man to let on that he spoke a language she could understand. The bitter taste of defeat coated her tongue. "I suppose you will try to stop me."

The man paused and stared at her for a long time, mouth slightly open. Many conflicted emotions flickered over his face before he unstuck his jaw and replied, "No, Milady, I will not." When Beatrice stared, stunned at him, he went on, "I have borne witness to enough of your arguments with the Master to know that you wish to leave. It… It is wrong to keep you here against your will. I will help you. But you must not take your child with you."

She stiffened, drawing the baby closer to her chest. "And why do you think that I should abandon my daughter here?" she asked coldly.

"Milady, she is not only _your_ child—"

"And you think that Kinzo has any greater a right to her than I do?!"

"No, Milady, I do not. But do you really think that, were you to take the Master's child away from him, the first child of his whom he has truly loved, that he would not tear the world apart looking for her?"

Beatrice bit her lip.

She wished she could say that the decision to leave her daughter in Odawara was a difficult one. She wished she could say that it was the hardest thing she had ever had to do in her life. It wasn't. That night, it was easy. It only grew hard later.

-0-0-0-

(Beatrice never named her firstborn child. When she left, Kinzo hadn't named her, either—neither of them had settled on a name for their child.

Doubtless, Kinzo had given the baby a name after she left. Beatrice hoped it was a good name, for the child's sake. As she was boarding the third of the ships she had taken to carry her back home, she thought that she would have named the child Nadia.)

-0-0-0-

When Beatrice Castiglioni met Paolo Silvestri, she was honestly beginning to consider joining a convent as her only alternative to homelessness and starvation.

No, Beatrice had not expected to return to the homeland and find it the way it had been before the war. Her parents' manor in Lombardy was still a burned, broken ruin. There was no telling if anyone had removed her mother's charred corpse, or the bodies of the servants who hadn't been able to get out in time—somehow, Beatrice doubted that the people who had burned the manor house had had the decency to do that.

She'd expected to come home and find her childhood home gutted and ruined. But as Beatrice began to wander about the north of Italy, looking for the rest of her family, she began to realize that she had been naïve. Italy had changed more than she could have anticipated.

The Castiglioni family had fallen with Mussolini. A symbol of the corruption of the old aristocracy, they had fallen. The adults were all killed, the children stripped of their names and ranks and sent to orphanages. It all seemed to Beatrice like something out of the French Revolution: the corrupt "old" was exterminated, and the "new" was called in to take its place. Whether it would last was anyone's guess.

Truth be told, Beatrice hadn't been terribly fond of most of her family. Her parents she had discovered she loved only after they died; for most of the rest, there wasn't even that. Those she had loved, she mourned for. Beatrice tried instead to find shelter with her old friends.

The result was a truly nasty shock. Most of Beatrice's friends were dead. Those who weren't paled at the sight of her on their doorstep, but not out of joy and relief to find her alive. It was ill-advised to be even tangentially connected with Mussolini. One whiff was all that it took to have the powers that be standing on your doorstep as well. None of Beatrice's friends wished to deal with that; to a man, they all turned her away. Maybe they hadn't been the friends she thought them to be.

Beatrice "Palladino" (if nothing else, her experiences since returning to Italy taught her that, for safety, she would have to part with her hated surname) found herself in Venice with only enough money to last her another two or so nights at the hotel where she was staying. She was trying to find work, but that wasn't as easy as it first sounded. All her prospective employers wanted proper identification and proof of education, neither of which Beatrice had—all of it had burned in the fire. Telling them her actual surname would have been a mistake, a bad one.

Most damning of all was the fact that Beatrice, a caged, pampered daughter of the nobility, had no 'practical' skills that would have allowed her to take the few jobs that didn't require proof of identification and education. She could write, of course, and could have been a secretary or a clerk, but that required documentation she didn't have and, quite frankly, better clothes. She could have been an interpreter for those who worked with English-speakers, but it was the same things that held her back.

As Beatrice wheeled out of the latest shop she had been denied work at, a man of around thirty or so caught her gaze and smiled kindly. "You look upset."

"I'm just trying to find work," she muttered, trying and failing to affix a smile to her face. "I'm not having much in the way of luck, unfortunately."

The man raised an eyebrow. "You like flowers?"

Beatrice frowned. "Yes, I do. Why?" Was that supposed to be some sort of come-on? Beatrice had heard many in her life, and while she'd heard worse, she had also heard many better.

"Well, it happens that my aunt runs a floristry nearby, and is in need of a new assistant."

 _That_ got Beatrice's attention. "Do you think she'd take me?' she asked sharply, gesturing at her unkempt, slightly greasy braid and at her shabby wool dress.

He laughed, not unkindly. "She's looked far worse herself on bad days. Aunt Gina would say yes if I but ask nicely." He stuck his hand out for Beatrice to shake. "Paolo Silvestri."

Beatrice grabbed his hand and shook it hard. Paolo's palm was rough and callused. "Beatrice Palladino."

-0-0-0-

They were married the following year, to the delight of Paolo's aunt and the short-lived consternation of his parents, who needed a bit more time to adjust to the idea of Paolo just marrying some strange woman he had met on the street one day in winter. Some of the guests looked askance at the complete absence of any of the bride's family and friends, but oddly this served to endear Beatrice to some of Paolo's more elderly relatives, who fussed sympathetically over the lonely bride. Beatrice considered telling them that her father would have considered this union deeply beneath her and her mother would have been aghast at how 'common' this all was, but thought better of it.

She didn't love Paolo when they married, but Beatrice didn't see how that was much of a problem. Mussolini had gone on and on about how it was a woman's righteous duty to bear children, going so far as to pressure them to stay out of the workplace and in the home. Mussolini was gone, but some of his old ideals remained. Paolo didn't look at her like she was some glorified broodmare. While it did irritate her that he kept insisting that he should be able to support her without her having to work, Beatrice supposed she could find something to do—this was _Venice_ , not some tiny backwater.

Beatrice had never expected love to enter into marriage. She and Paolo liked each other, respected each other. That was a lot better than what Beatrice could have expected when the Castiglioni's star was still high. And it would hardly be the first time she'd had sex with someone she didn't love.

(There was one thing, above all others, that Beatrice could be grateful to Paolo for. At least now there was no chance that she would ever be known as a 'daughter of the Castiglioni' again.)

She did not think she loved Paolo until the time came when she felt the need, ever-growing within her, to confess as much as she could.

When she told him that he wasn't the first man she had been with, he rolled over in bed and shrugged. "I've pursued more women than I care to count. Great skirt-chaser I was as a teenager. But now that we've married, it's only proper for us to settle down, don't you think?"

Sitting up in bed, Beatrice stared at him, shocked. Further, almost as if to challenge him, Beatrice revealed that she had lied about who she was, that she was a scion of the Castiglioni family.

"I suppose that's why you don't have any papers," he muttered thickly, yawning. "Makes sense."

Beatrice felt tears gathering at the corners of her eyes. She wouldn't have known whether to cry in sorrow or rage. All of this, and he still accepted her. She'd never even told Kinzo that there had been others before him, for fear that he would reject her. The words 'I abandoned my only child because I was terrified of her father' hung on the tip of her tongue, but she lied back down and curled up against Paolo instead.

-0-0-0-

When Pietro was born, it took Beatrice a month before she could stand to be in the same room as him for more than a few minutes at a time.

She was weak and pale. When Beatrice woke up in the mornings, she never felt properly rested and could barely get out of bed—there were some days when she didn't get up at all. She didn't want to see anyone for any reason and barely tolerated the company of her husband. She would start crying for ostensibly no reason, unable to tell anyone why she was crying (Refusing to tell then why). There was not a word that anyone could say to comfort her when she started to weep.

The doctor diagnosed her with an illness she'd not heard of before: postpartum depression. In addition to prescribing her some sort of antidepressant, he recommended rest, avoidance of stressful stimuli, plenty of food, and as much interaction with the baby as possible.

For the first month of Pietro's life, Paolo's mother practically moved in with them. She did all the cooking and cleaning around the house, and she took care of Pietro when Beatrice wasn't nursing and couldn't take care of him. Claudia Silvestri's opinion ran contrary to the doctor's. If the baby was the cause of Beatrice's illness, than she should be allowed to take her rest away from him. Beatrice was grateful to her mother-in-law for this.

Beatrice kept the truth from everyone; no one knew the true cause of her depression. Maybe it was postpartum depression after all, but in that case, Pietro's birth was a tipping point, rather than a catalyst.

When you looked at a newborn baby, unless you looked at their genitalia it wasn't like you could really determine gender. Pietro was a baby of average weight, seven pounds at birth, to be exact with a thin, fine layer of golden hair upon his head. When Beatrice looked at him, when she held him, she had to fight not to remember another baby who had been of average weight and had a thin, fine layer of golden hair on her head.

Paolo would proudly introduce Pietro as their firstborn child to anyone who dropped by. _Your firstborn_ , Beatrice thought bitterly. _Not mine._

Pietro would never know his sister. Nadia would never know her brother. The only way they could ever meet would be if Beatrice and Kinzo were to reunite somehow; Beatrice shuddered to think of how he would react to see her married to another man and mother of his child. Her children would never know each other because she had given in to fear and fled Japan without her daughter.

Over the years, Beatrice had always tried to push the thought of her Nadia from her mind, but had never quite succeeded. Nadia would be old enough to go to school now; how was she doing, an obviously foreign-blooded girl in a strange land? How was she being raised? Did Kinzo continue to keep her in secret, or had he introduced her to his own household? Had he perhaps given her away? Beatrice didn't like to think that—she doubted that Kinzo would willingly let go of anything that he valued—but the possibility stuck in her mind when all others melted away.

And what did little Nadia know of her mother? Did she know that her mother had abandoned her when she was but a week old? Had she been told some story about how her mother had died when she was too young to remember her? Did she know anything about Beatrice at all?

Beatrice looked down at Pietro, and wondered how she could ever be a mother to her son when she had never been a mother to her daughter. How could she just pick her life back up and move on when her daughter had to live her life never knowing her mother? It didn't seem to Beatrice that God would simply allow a woman who had abandoned a child of her flesh to have a happy life after doing something like that.

 _What do I know about being a mother, anyways? Abandoning Nadia has proven my incompetence, if nothing else. I should not have feared Kinzo following me to the ends of the earth_ —this was perhaps a little too over-confident, as Beatrice still feared the possibility of Kinzo finding _her_ here— _and I should not have allowed myself to be separated from her. Would my parents have left me, under such circumstances? A fine example I set for my own children._

Over time, her fretting lessened, somewhat. Beatrice could only suppose that this was the result of the medicine doing its work, for she could think of no other reason why her troubles might come to an uneasy rest. She set her mind to raising Pietro. If she could not be a mother to Nadia, she could be a mother to the child present in her life. She owed him that much.

-0-0-0-

When Giovanni was born, the pain was lesser. Beatrice had already learned that she could be a good mother, even though she had abandoned her first child on the other side of the world. When Lucia was born, the pain was like a faint ache the day after you hit your arm against a doorframe. It helped that Lucia, while she looked the most like her mother of the three of them, alone had her father's dark brown hair. By the time her granddaughters were born, Beatrice felt no pain at all to see them come into the world.

It would never _not_ hurt that she had left Nadia behind. Beatrice knew that this would always be a black mark against her, and one that bothered her far more than what the church would call the sin of promiscuity. She knew that she would bear this cross until the day that she died, and would carry it before God when she went before him to receive judgment.

It was better that it would always hurt. If it always hurt, Beatrice would be less likely to make the same mistake twice, and would never hurt another of her children like that. She could still live her life happily.

At last, Beatrice remembered words she had uttered long ago. _"Italian women don't break easily."_

-0-0-0-

Beatrice Silvestri would tell you that you hadn't really lived if you had managed to go your whole life without regrets. There came at this point an odd gleam in her eyes that listeners never commented upon.

But, she said next, how you dealt with regret went a long way towards determining how you dealt with life. If you wallowed in regret forever, you would never move on. If you shouldered it instead, you could walk with strength, and see the light of your future before you.


	3. Chapter Three

There was a young woman, a girl, really, standing outside of Saint Mark's Basilica.

That was nothing unusual in itself. There were many who flocked to the basilica, whether to attend Mass or pay their respects. There were many who gathered here just to drink in the cathedral's splendid beauty. Saint Mark's Basilica was a popular destination, for native Italians, tourists and pigeons alike.

But there was something about this girl, something familiar. Beatrice couldn't quite place what it was about her that seemed familiar; to her knowledge, she had never seen the girl before. The girl wore a sleeveless, light blue cotton sundress. She was a little taller than average, with a straight, slender, almost boyish physique. Her arms were tanned, but her shoulders and face were freckled instead. Her short hair was golden-brown on top, but there were darker shades close to her neck that suggested that it had bleached in the sun. Her eyes, when Beatrice got a good look at them, were a stormy blue-gray.

The girl's name was Sayo Yasuda, or likely 'Yasuda Sayo' in her own tongue. A Japanese tourist, it seemed, though she certainly didn't look like a full-blooded Japanese woman. Blue eyes, for one, weren't a very common trait among that people. And as Sayo revealed with a little prodding, she wasn't full-blooded Japanese. Her grandmother had been from Italy. Her mother's name, when she still lived, was Beatrice.

'Beatrice.' That was an odd coincidence.

They spoke a little more, Beatrice trying to inquire after Sayo's mother and grandmother. Her chest grew strangely tight when Sayo revealed that her mother had died when she was very young. When she said that her grandmother had died too, a long time ago, Beatrice felt empty. She didn't know whether to take it as a good sign of a bad one.

Then, Sayo frowned. Beatrice didn't know what she had said to make her frown, didn't know what could have happened to make the young woman (really, a young woman, age of twenty) upset or pensive. Sayo frowned, and Beatrice felt her blood run cold. The way her brow furrowed, the way her eyes narrowed and her mouth tightened, it was so much the same as how Kinzo looked when he frowned that it was like watching his spirit ghost over her face. It was nearly enough to make Beatrice glance over Sayo's shoulder to see if the man himself was there.

Beatrice began to see in Sayo a great deal of herself at her age. The sense of emptiness longing to be filled, the sense of alienation from everyone around her, the sense of aimlessness that set her to wander without any destination in mind, not knowing what she was looking for, only that it wasn't here. Beatrice might have been projecting, considering that she had seen of Sayo and had learned of her. She might have been projecting on Sayo, considering what she had begun to suspect about her.

Beatrice invited Sayo to stay with her and her family. She felt strikingly giddy when Sayo said 'yes.'

-0-0-0-

Sayo insisted upon returning to her hotel first for her belongings. Beatrice was at first afraid that there would be many bags that needed to be carried (she regretted now making a detour to Pietro's house first), but was frankly more shocked to see that all of Sayo's belongings fit in one suitcase. "I don't have much I would value enough to take with me," Sayo explained shortly. "And I didn't want to be weighed down."

They said little as they walked back to Beatrice's house. Sayo was absorbed in the task of wheeling her rather ungainly suitcase down the streets; Beatrice could barely parse all the questions swirling in her head. Sayo did have a few questions, though. What was Venice like in the winter? Did it snow? Were the people here friendly to foreigners who came to stay? Was it difficult to find work here?

"You sound as if you intend to stay here," Beatrice remarked.

Sayo nodded. "I do. Maybe not in Venice itself, but somewhere here in Italy."

"Well, you should understand that getting citizenship may be somewhat difficult. And why are you planning to stay here permanently?" Beatrice asked, glancing interestedly at the young woman beside her. "What about Japan?"

At this, Sayo shook her head sharply. "No, I've no intention of going back to Japan. There's nothing for me there."

"What about your family?"

"I…" Sayo tipped her head up and frowned deeply. It was the same frown that had reminded Beatrice so much of Kinzo, and could still make her heart skip a beat. "No." She licked her lips. "I have no family in Japan."

Beatrice thought it better not to pursue this line of conversation. If they were to have the conversation again, they would have to have it later.

When they reached Beatrice's house, they were met by Giovanni's daughter Isabella. Giovanni and his wife Anna were in Rome on a business trip, not due back for a week; Isabella would stay with her grandparents until they returned. "Hi, Grandma!" Isabella called cheerfully from the open doorway. "Who's that with you?" she asked, staring curiously at Sayo.

Beatrice waved Sayo forward, smiling encouragingly at her; Sayo was starting to eye the house a bit dubiously. "Isabella, this is Sayo Yasuda, a traveler from Japan. She's going to be staying here for a while and I want you to be very polite to her. Sayo, this is Isabella Silvestri, my granddaughter."

Sayo let go of her suitcase and stepped forward, staring oddly at Isabella. Beatrice had known many to be charmed by Isabella—dark-haired, dark-eyed Isabella was such a pretty, winsome child that it was easy for her to charm everyone around her without ever realizing it. But the way Sayo was looking at Isabella wasn't the look of someone who had been charmed by her toothy grin and dancing eyes, not exactly. The looked she wore instead was almost nostalgic. It made the hairs on the back of Beatrice's neck stand up.

In one fluid movement, Sayo dropped to a crouch before Isabella. "How do you do, young lady?" she asked solemnly, almost too formally, her face schooled into a deliberately neutral expression.

Isabella giggled. "I'm fine, thank you." The manners Anna had been trying to drill into her finally seemed to be taking some effect. "It's nice to meet you."

Little Isabella stuck out a hand for Sayo to shake, and Sayo took it without even missing a beat.

-0-0-0-

The physical resemblance between Sayo and Lucia was so intense that it hurt. Everyone noticed it immediately, even Isabella, who squealed, "Oh, Aunt Lucia, you and Sayo look like sisters!"

Lucia and Sayo stared at each other, at the identical tilt of their eyes and the near-identical line of their cheekbones. They stared at the identical texture of their hair and slope of their shoulders. If they did not look _exactly_ alike (a small collection of differences around the mouth and jaw and nose), they looked enough alike for the two young women to be visibly startled when they saw each other.

Paolo raised an eyebrow at the two of them and inquired of Beatrice, "Long-lost daughter?"

Sayo blushed deeply and shrank back from Paolo, eyeing him warily. Beatrice hit her husband on the arm with the back of her hand. "Of course not, you great joker!" she laughed.

Sayo's reaction to Paolo's pert remark sent him from joking to apologetic. He didn't seem to notice how half-hearted his wife's laugh was.

-0-0-0-

Supper was leftover lasagna from the night before and fruit salad made up of apples, oranges, strawberries and blueberries. "Fruit salad's about the only thing Bice can make without burning it," Paolo remarked with a laugh. Personally, Sayo wasn't sure how not burning something that didn't go on the stove or into the oven was supposed to be a major accomplishment, but chose not to comment.

In some ways, Paolo, Lucia and Isabella reminded Sayo of people whom she had known on Rokkenjima.

Paolo was somewhat reminiscent of Gohda. He was an excellent cook (though not quite so excellent as Gohda) and a bit of a boaster (Though not so much as Gohda). To be honest, these traits, however superficial a resemblance there might really be between Paolo and Gohda, put Sayo on her guard around the man. Gohda could be so cruel, pushing his shifts onto Sayo when he knew that she didn't have time, or putting her down in front of Genji or Madam, or piling yet more of his work upon her. Gohda had resented the fact that two teenagers (really one) were so much more highly ranked than he was, that one of them was allowed to directly serve the Master when he was not. He couldn't complain to Madam or Genji or Kumasawa, so he took it out on Shannon and especially Kanon instead.

The worst thing about Gohda, though, was that he wasn't cruel and thoughtless all the time. Sometimes, he was polite to Sayo, with no contempt in his voice. Sometimes, he was almost friendly. That was the worst thing about Gohda. It honestly felt like he was trying to soften her up between blows so that they would hurt more when they came. Though she knew it wasn't fair to Paolo, Sayo couldn't help but be wary of someone who even superficially behaved like Gohda. She was afraid she'd spend her time here waiting for him to do something callously hurtful to her.

Lucia was a bright, talkative young woman only a few years older than Sayo herself. When the conversation slipped, Lucia bore it back up. Sayo wondered if she could even bear to hear silence seeping over the kitchen table. Lucia put Sayo in mind of Jessica, lively and relatively easygoing, though Sayo got the impression that Lucia wasn't quite as tomboyish as Jessica was. She certainly couldn't picture Lucia sneaking off to play softball with her friends after school or going behind her parents' backs to learn how to play the guitar.

(The image of Jessica turning her back on Kanon and running back into the mansion in tears flashed through Sayo's mind. Jessica had avoided Kanon for days after that. If Sayo was a little more receptive to answering Lucia's many questions about Japan than she otherwise would have been, well, that was only just.)

By the time Sayo turned her eyes to Isabella, she felt as though she was grasping at straws. Isabella going on excitedly about ghost stories she had heard from her friends today put Sayo in mind of Maria, but really, apart from that, Isabella wasn't anything like Maria. Beatrice had been Maria's only friend. Maria had been unable to make friends at school, as her classmates were unwilling to see past her outwardly strange exterior to the deeply loving girl within. Maria had not had two loving parents, but only a monster of a mother who didn't appreciate her any more than her classmates. Anyone who looked at cheerful, outgoing, untroubled Isabella could see how lovely and loving she was.

(If Sayo was more receptive to Isabella's questions as well, that was only just. Beatrice had abandoned Maria, in the end. Maria would never see the Golden Land.)

Beatrice Silvestri alone did not remind Sayo of anyone she had known on Rokkenjima. The obvious connections would have been with Natsuhi or Kumasawa, but there was no comparison. Beatrice was not strict and overbearing like Natsuhi, nor was she a lazy jokester like Kumasawa. Sayo felt an odd prick of familiarity looking at the woman, but it was a prick that had no basis in the Ushiromiya family or their servants. It still bothered her, though.

But what threw Sayo most of all was that this meal could not have been less like a meal taken on Rokkenjima.

Of course, the closest Sayo had ever gotten to one of the Ushiromiya family's meals was as a server. She was often dragged in to one of the family's fights during the yearly conference or during another visit; more often than not it was Eva mocking her performance as a server to shame Natsuhi, and Natsuhi punishing her for her incompetence later. Sayo rarely emerged from one of those meals unscathed, but her primary role was that of the observer. Never before had she sat down to a meal _with_ a family, even as a guest.

The first thing that struck Sayo was just how informal it all was. The dining room table could quite comfortably sit eight people, though Lucia confided that once, at a party, there had been nearly thirty people crammed around it. There was a smaller table where children sat when there more than one present. Since Isabella was the only child here, she would sit with the adults so as not to grow lonely. There was also the matter of Isabella needing to be watched so that her table manners could be corrected if they had to.

The glass casserole pan full of lasagna and the bowl full of fruit salad were placed right on the dining room table instead of being kept out of sight in the kitchen. Sayo and Lucia set the table together; Paolo served the meal; Beatrice served the drinks.

Neither was there any set seating arrangements. No one sat at the head of the table; everyone just seemed to sit where they wanted to. Sayo sat at the far right-hand end of the table, besides Lucia and across from Paolo, and she couldn't help but be amazed. There was no rigid classification system. Guests were not forced to the low end of the table and wives were not counted as lesser than the children they bore. You could just sit anywhere you wanted, eat as much as you wanted, and no one cared if your shoulders slumped a little bit or if some of your food fell off of your fork and on to the table.

And no one was at each other's throats, either. Isabella continued to inform everyone of what she and her friends had done today. Paolo mentioned that he was attending the opening of a hotel he'd done some of the architectural work on and asked around if anyone wanted to join him. Lucia was delighted over a job offer she'd received with some guided tours service. Beatrice addressed Sayo personally, telling her all there was to know of Venice that could be said over supper. There were no arguments or accusations, no insults flung over the table. Sayo supposed that she could have missed the subtleties of passive-aggressive sniping for having not been a native speaker of Italian her whole life, but for the life of her she couldn't begin to guess where the sniping would have come from.

Sayo thought that she was naïve, but up until now, she hadn't imagined that a family could sit down to a meal like this and keep from putting their family members down through insults or forcing them into a lower position at the table. She hadn't imagined that a family could simply enjoy a meal with each other and not feel the need to draw blood in order to puff themselves up. And yet, here they were.

Whenever she could, Sayo just drank it in, wondering and a little melancholy.

-0-0-0-

After supper, Isabella cornered Sayo in the living room.

Little Isabella seemed convinced that Sayo must know many stories. Sayo wasn't sure if this was supposed to be some dubious and possibly racist typecasting of the Japanese or nothing less innocent than a little girl's misconceptions. Either way, Sayo knew what was expected of her as a guest in the Silvestri family's home. She couldn't do anything less.

"Oh, you really don't have to," Lucia assured her, shooting a not-quite glare at her niece, but Sayo raised her hand and shook her head.

"What kind of stories would you like to hear?" Sayo asked Isabella, sitting down beside her on the couch.

Isabella's face creased in concentration. Now _here_ was a scene straight from Rokkenjima, Maria begging Beatrice for another story or a magic trick. Sayo couldn't keep a saucy smirk from stealing over her lips. "What's the saddest story you know?" Isabella finally demanded of her.

Maria had never asked for sad stories. She knew enough already. "Well…" Sayo paused, wracking her brains. "…The saddest story I can think of is how an Inugami is made."

"What's an Inugami?"

"An Inugami is a dog spirit—" Sayo thought it better not to use the term 'demon' or 'god'; she had been raised to believe in one God alone, and she doubted that mentions of demons would go over well here "—bound to obey whoever creates it, though it is easy for the Inugami to escape its creator's control."

"How's an Inugami made?" Isabella asked innocently.

Sayo hesitated, looking to Beatrice for guidance. When her host only nodded encouragingly, Sayo could only conclude that Beatrice had no idea what an Inugami was or how it was created. Fantastic. "An Inugami," Sayo said carefully, "is created when a pet dog is starved to death in a very specific way."

Isabella's face fell, and Lucia muttered in Sayo's ear, "I think you were a little too blunt."

Sayo felt heat crawling up her neck. "I'm very sorry," she murmured. "I didn't mean to upset her. All the same, you don't know the half of it."

Lucia grimaced. Sayo could only imagine what images and stories Lucia's mind conjured, in the absence of facts.

Thankfully, Isabella bounced back quickly enough. "Will you please tell me a ghost story?" She pressed her little hands on Sayo's leg and stared pleadingly up into her eyes.

Now they were back on solid ground. Sayo nodded, tapping into the dignity of the Witch rather than her mischievous streak. It felt better to have Beatrice the Golden's dignity than her cruel streak, anyways. "Alright, Isabella. I'll tell you a ghost story.

"Off the coast of Japan, there is an island called Rokkenjima. There lives a very rich family called the Ushiromiya family in a mansion with a beautiful rose garden. But the family are not the only ones who live there. Besides the servants, there is a witch named Beatrice."

At this point, Sayo looked over to the armchair where Beatrice Silvestri sat. When she saw the old woman's shocked expression, she raised her hands defensively. "My apologies if I have offended you. I'm not making any of this up; this is how the story has always gone, even on Rokkenjima and before I was born as well."

Beatrice still seemed a little shaken, but she nodded. "Go on, then."

"Right." A slightly feverish gleam entered Sayo's eyes. She had always loved stories, the process of creation. "The old head of the Ushiromiya family was a magician of peculiar skill. He lacked the talent to use magic to heat a teapot, but he was yet capable of summoning a demon who could boil an entire ocean. What he lacked in precision and general talent he made up for in persistence. When the magician became determined to do something, he would never give up until he met with success."

"This doesn't sound like a ghost story."

"I'm getting to that. Anyway, the magician was determined to summon the witch, Beatrice the Golden, as anyone able to contract with her would receive a fabulous amount of gold. Kin—the magician, he labored for many years, ever-refining his summoning circle and transferring his power into the enchantments. Finally, he succeeded in summoning her.

"Beatrice answered the magician's summons just to laugh at him. She was a thousand-year-old witch, you see, and the efforts of a mortal magician were laughable in her eyes. But when he spoke, she was impressed with his diligence, so she agreed to contract with him.

"They worked out an arrangement by which, for the next forty years, the magician would be endowed with ten tons of gold. The magician was free to do with the gold what he willed and use it to build up a vast fortune. When the forty years were up, the witch would return and reclaim her gold; if it was not found and returned to her, everything of the family would be hers."

Sayo's face darkened. "But that wasn't the end of it.

"The magician saw Beatrice's beauty and became enamored of her. My gran… The witch laughed at him when he professed his love for her. She was a thousand years old, and he but a young man. He had nothing to offer her. He was only human, and frankly he wasn't the best magician either. But the magician would not take no for an answer. Using magic and determination, he bound her soul to the island, refusing to let her leave Rokkenjima.

"For a few years, Beatrice played the game, hoping to persuade Kinzo to let her go peacefully. But as it became clearer that this would never occur, she grew desperate. In her desperation, my—the witch cut her ties to the flesh, hoping that as a spirit she would eventually be able to leave the island. But the magician was a clever man. Before Beatrice could draw enough power to leave, the magician bound her soul to a human doll, causing Beatrice to forget that she had ever been a witch, that she had ever been anything but human. The magician intended to make the human Beatrice into someone who would love him.

"K… He, to my mo… He…" Sayo drew a deep, ragged breath. "I'm sorry, I need to think for a moment." From the kitchen doorway, Paolo leveled a concerned gaze at her. _This wasn't a good idea. This really was_ not _a good idea. But I have to go on. I promised Isabella a story, and I can't just stop it halfway._

"For nearly twenty years, Beatrice lived as a human. She had no memory outside of life spent in a mansion secreted away in the forest on Rokkenjima. That was how Kin—the magician wanted it." Sayo clenched her hands on her knees before realizing what she was doing. "He didn't want her to leave. He didn't want her to remember. He only wanted her to love him, and didn't care what he had to do to gain her love.

"All this went on for nearly twenty years, until one day, the magician's youngest daughter, a young teenaged girl, found the mansion in the forest, and found Beatrice. With the girl's help, Beatrice remembered who she was. She remembered that she was the Golden Witch, and that she had been imprisoned here. The witch and the girl resolved to leave Rokkenjima, the former promising the latter that she would spirit her away from her unhappy life. But as they were climbing down the cliffs to the shore, my… She… Beatrice fell from the Cliffside, and died."

"This seems more like a sad story than a ghost story," Isabella pointed out, leaning into her aunt's side all the while.

Sayo smiled wanly at her. "Ghost stories are often sad when you stop to think about it, Isabella. As I was saying, Beatrice died, and her spirit separated from her body. Still bound to the island, Beatrice fled before the magician could find her again, taking shelter in the dense forest.

"Seventeen years passed. Beatrice became known simultaneously as the Golden Witch and the Witch of the Forest, a figure of fear and awe. When her name was whispered, her power grew. Eventually, emboldened by the tastes of power, Beatrice took up residence in the mansion the magician shared with his family. She needed to find her gold in order to recover her power entirely. The magician had hidden it somewhere, she didn't know where exactly, but she knew that it was somewhere on the mansion's grounds.

"She pulled pranks to frighten the family members and the servants, slamming doors and opening windows and stealing small objects whenever she could. The more people believed in her, the stronger she became. Beatrice did this to everyone but to the magician himself—she feared making herself vulnerable to him, and also did not believe that he deserved to feel any sign of her presence.

"Finally, in the hour of the magician's death, Beatrice discovered her gold. She appeared before the magician one last time to tell him of her find, and to her surprise, he let her go in peace. The witch lingered on the island for a while afterwards to set her affairs in order, but eventually she left the island for good, never to return."

Isabella frowned at her. "For a ghost story, that didn't have a whole lot of ghosts in it."

Sayo shook her head, shoulders sagging. "No, I suppose it didn't. But it was about the witch, not ghosts."

"I guess that's okay."

Sayo felt very tired, all of a sudden.

-0-0-0-

When the sun sank below the horizon and all was said and done, Sayo allowed Beatrice Silvestri to show her up to her room. The arrangement felt frankly strange to her. Sayo was far more used to conducting others to their rooms in the mansion on Rokkenjima than having someone else do the same for her. Even after months of staying as a guest in various Italian hotels, this felt strange; it didn't help that most of the time she had had to find her room on her own.

"I don't believe you ever told me your grandmother's name, dear."

Sayo looked over at Beatrice in surprise. Beatrice's voice was almost affectedly disinterested. Actually, it _was_ affectedly disinterested. Sayo frowned at her. Beatrice had set herself to putting Sayo's clothes up in the closet while Sayo tested the bed, but Sayo could see the tense arch of the old woman's back. The prick of familiarity returned, nagging at her. Sayo couldn't ignore it.

"No, I didn't tell you my grandmother's name." Sayo sat down on the edge of the bed and ran her hand over the coverlet. "She was also called Beatrice."

"Was she?" Beatrice's voice hitched.

"Yes, she was." Sayo stared intently at her. "My mother was named for her."

"And your grandmother's surname—"

"I don't see how that's—"

"Was it Castiglioni?"

Sayo gaped at her. She felt like her heart would stop beating. She felt like she would be sick.

Beatrice wasn't smiling. Instead, her brow was drawn up as though she might cry. Sayo had seen that expression, and finally she realized what it was about Beatrice that seemed so familiar. It was the portrait in the entrance hall, and it stared back at Sayo in the mirror on the rare occasion she had to look in one. Diluted by decades it might have been, but the resemblance was still there. "And your grandfather… He was a man named Kinzo, wasn't he?"

She hadn't even put two and two together when she saw Lucia. Sayo swallowed hard—she was such an idiot, still.

"No."

"Sayo, I—"

"Can you prove it?" This felt like another conversation, one she was having with other people in a different place, a different time. But this wasn't like last time—Sayo wasn't screaming and she could only speak dully with weary acceptance. No attempt at denial here. "Can you?"

Beatrice's face crumpled. Sayo found that, unusually, she didn't really care. God could sling whatever blows He wanted to beat repentance into her; that was His right. When Beatrice sat down beside her, Sayo stared down at her shaking hands in her lap. "My name is Beatrice Silvestri, but I was born Beatrice Castiglioni. I am the daughter of Leandro Castiglioni, a close confidant of Benito Mussolini, and Leandro's wife, Renata.

"In 1945, my father and I left Italy in a submarine, on a highly secretive mission," Beatrice said tonelessly. Sayo didn't dare look up to gauge her expression. "My mother had already died by this point. My father wouldn't tell me what we were doing, traveling with the submarine's crew like this. He would only apologize to me, saying how sorry he was that I would have to live among foreigners for the foreseeable future.

"The submarine took damage, and, over time, most of the crew died, including my father. By the time we made an emergency docking at Rokkenjima, there were ten men aside from myself left alive. But Rokkenjima was not owned by the Ushiromiya family at that time. It was instead a mostly-forgotten Japanese military base. It was there that I first met Ushiromiya Kinzo.

"I am not the storyteller you are, my dear, at least not when it comes to recounting my life. I will keep this brief. It turns out that my father had been tasked with transporting ten tons of Italian gold away from the Allies. The Japanese and Italian soldiers fought to the death over who would take ownership of the gold." _Yes, and then Kinzo hid their corpses away to mask his own guilt in the massacre_. "Only Kinzo and I were left alive." A sharp tremor shook at Beatrice's shoulders.

"After the end of the war, Kinzo set me up in a house in Odawara, the town where he lived. I was happy for a while, but it didn't last. On October 28, 1948, I gave birth to a baby girl. And a week later, I left in the dead of night."

… _I was right. He_ did _kidnap her. He did commit murder so that he could have Beatrice all to himself. The gold, too. How could she live with a man like that for as long as she did? How…_

_She left without my mother._

"And Kinzo…"

Sayo's head snapped up. Beatrice perched uncomfortably on the edge of the bed, her shoulders still shaking slightly. "He's dead," Sayo whispered, her eyes huge. "He died in 1984."

Beatrice slumped. Sayo didn't know what to feel as the sight of relief stealing over the old woman's—her _grandmother's_ —face. "Thank you," Beatrice muttered. "Thanks to you, I can put an old ghost to rest."

Sayo said nothing. Would that she could put Kinzo to rest the same way.

This was a joke, wasn't it? It was a massive joke of fate that Sayo could flee one branch of her family only to be delivered into the hands of another, half a world away. Was she still the puppet of fate? Had she missed some strings when she was cutting her ties to fate? This seemed like such a cruel joke…

"So Kinzo's _entire_ family has died?"

The sound of Beatrice's voice drew Sayo from her ponderings. "I'm sorry?"

Beatrice's brow furrowed. "I asked you if the entire Ushiromiya family had died."

"What? Oh, no." Sayo waved a hand indifferently. "The Ushiromiya family is alive and well."

"But you said…"

_You said you didn't have any family._

Sayo smiled bitterly. "I was brought up in the house as a servant, not as their niece, cousin, granddaughter, or anything else like that." _Because the woman who was supposed to become my adoptive mother hated me so much that she tried to kill me, and made me like_ this _instead._ "I didn't even know that I was related to them until a few years ago." Beatrice's face fell. "They weren't much of a family, anyways," Sayo added, remembering the instinct to want to comfort someone who showed such a dejected face.

_They really weren't much of a family. My would-be mother stalked after me waiting for me to make a mistake so that she could punish me. Eva delighted in mocking me to shame Natsuhi in front of the family—some sister she was._

_George and Jessica were friendly towards me, but only because to them I was an object of sexual desire and attraction. Never mind that I am… I am damaged. Never mind that I'm both their cousin and their parents' sibling, and that to have a relationship with them would be to commit incest twice over. But they never knew that, and they didn't care to learn what being 'furniture' meant._

_Maria was the only one I would have been glad to call 'cousin' or 'niece', but even she couldn't see me for who I really was._

_And for a time, I wished death upon them all. We really aren't much of a family._

But did the Silvestri family have any more potential to be a family to her? They, those members whom Sayo had met, had been kind to her when she approached them as a 'guest'. Sayo knew that there was a large difference between 'guest' and family member, between 'guest' and 'niece' and 'cousin' and 'step-grandchild' and… And 'granddaughter.'

Assuming that they accepted her claim as fact, would they accept her? _Could_ they accept her? There was little in Sayo that was worth loving, or even liking. Who could love her, knowing what she had done, what she had considered, what she was? Who could love her knowing that her life as a woman was a sham, when she had been born a boy and would have remained such if not for her foster mother's malice? Who could love someone like her?

On Rokkenjima, Sayo hadn't really wanted to find out.

"Do you want to stay here?"

"I… You've already asked that question, haven't you?"

"Do you want to _stay_ here?" Beatrice asked again.

"I…"

Her vision blurred. _God, does she have any idea what she's asking?_

Sayo let out a choked sob when Beatrice slid her arms over her shoulders and pulled her close. "I'll tell Paolo everything," Beatrice assured her, "though I imagine he'll have some questions for you."

Sayo wound her arms around her grandmother's back. "Of course," she mumbled, trying and failing to hold back tears.

Starting over didn't sound so bad.


End file.
